I believe I can say, without overstating the case, that no element of our figurative rhetoric of writing is more important than the Conduit Metaphor. It is known by various names such as “the container metaphor,” “the transmission model,” “the code model,” and in Carolyn Miller's well-known formulation the “windowpane theory of communication.” According to the Conduit Metaphor, language contains meaning; speakers and writers use linguistic containers to send meaning to audiences; and, at the end of the line, audiences remove the unaltered meaning from its container. Many language scholars, including writing specialists, have raised objections to the Conduit Metaphor, objections that vary in motivation and rationale. What is most striking to me, however, is not the variety of analysis applied to the Conduit Metaphor but the nearly unanimous condemnation the metaphor elicits.

Almost universally, current language scholars object that language is fundamentally indirect, imprecise, contingent, and unstable; thus we never transmit a perfect representation of the “external” world through a secure pipeline leading from giver to receiver (e.g., 
Miller 1979; Bizzell 1982; Slack, Miller, and Doak 1993; Axley 1996; Weiss 1997; Prior 1998; Bowden 1999; Longo 2000; Evans 2003; Cowley and Love 2006; Krzeszowski 2006). In short, most of us have said that the Conduit Metaphor is wrong because language does 
not work the way the metaphor assumes.

Turn to almost any page in any book about writing, or listen to any conversation between people who care about writing, and you are likely to come across a metaphor that is familiar or striking – or both. In a single paragraph of the time-honored The Elements of Style, we encounter words that “ignite” and “explode in the mind,” prose that is like “music … capable of stirring the listener deeply,” writing that is done “clearly,” and writers who “steer by the stars” (Strunk and White 2008: 66).

If we disregard Wierzbicka's mental syntax, we may well compare her semantic primes to those which were at the core of the mainstream Continental European semantic theories of the 1960s and the 1970s. Usually we trace this semantic feature theory back to Louis Hjelmslev's Prolegomena (Hjelmslev 1963 [1943]). His phonological analysis and his concept of the phoneme became the model for semantic analysis and the concept of the séme, as it quickly became popular in the linguistics of Romance languages. Bernard Pottier combined Hjelmslev's approach with the Prague school of structuralism. He was also the first to call the ‘distinctive semantic features of lexemes’ sémes. This is how he describes the meaning of chair:

Thus meaning can be analysed in terms of differences, through the presence or absence of sémes. It is this focus on difference which grounds this theory in de Saussure's structuralism.

Algirdas Julien Greimas also uses the concept of sémes (Greimas 1983 [1966]: 22ff.). He distinguishes between the presence of a séme, the negation of this presence (‘negative séme’) and a state in which a given theme is neither present nor absent (‘neutral séme’).

In this chapter, I want to show how we can work together to negotiate the meaning of a text. What I present is not a methodology, not a manual for interpretation that delivers a result quasi-automatically by going through the process step by step. What I want to show is that while interpretation is an activity with an unpredictable outcome, for those who collaborate there is one reality on which they can base their negotiations: the reality of the text embedded in the reality of the discourse. This is the reality available to all those concerned in the interpretation. This is the common basis. I have purposefully chosen a text that is rather removed from our ordinary life-world, this very unassuming haiku:

This is a haiku of little if any poetic value. But that is not the point. What I am interested in is what it means. As with any new contribution to the discourse, the only way to make sense of it is to look at it as a reaction to what has been said before. If we were to take it as a text that has not emerged out of the discourse we could never assign an interpretation to it. We would still see all those words looking so familiar, but we could not be sure what they mean. It would be a text constructed on Humpty Dumpty principles.

Children learn to speak as they grow up among people who are already speaking. These people are normally their parents or other carers, or other people with whom they are brought into contact, and, of course, their peers. It is the interaction with other people that lets children learn the language(s) they encounter in their environment. It is not more normal for children to learn just one language than several. Multilingualism is the norm in many societies and situations, and this is not a new phenomenon. A child in Hong Kong will have few problems communicating with their mother in English, their father in Mandarin, their nanny in Malay and their peers in Cantonese. How they do it we hardly know. Their linguistic behaviour in given situations, and their own reports, are our only sources of information. We know that some children learn languages faster than others, and there is an abundance of literature detailing the ways in which progress is made in the course of language acquisition. We also know that the faculty for learning new languages without particular effort wanes during puberty. What we do not know, in spite of Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor, is how this language faculty works. So far, all the models representing it have had to be withdrawn at some point.

In his text Peri Hermeneias (‘On Interpretation’) Aristotle tells us: ‘Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience.’ For him, as for Chomsky, the language system has a material location: the human mind. Without human minds, there would be no language system.

The belief that the human mind is, or contains, a mechanism that makes us speak and understand has been with us ever since Aristotle. Innateness and universality are by no mean novel ideas. The philosophy of the Western world has, with few exceptions, always adhered to the belief that language as such, in its pure and perennial form, is found in the mind, and that all the language decay in its spoken and written reality is due to the objectionable influences of social deterioration.

Aristotle's Peri Hermeneias is worth quoting in more detail, as an early example of the belief that the words we use correspond to innate and universal mental concepts. These are the first sentences of Aristotle's tract:

I have devoted so many pages to accentuating the difference between traditional oral and more recent literate ways of communication, because we have to bear in mind the differences between them when we want to find out what the study of language can and can't do. In our society we find, side by side, primordial speech situations and metalinguistic reflections of arguably great depth. But while it is impossible to reduce a primordial speech situation to a written text, this can easily be done with oral discussions that do not involve extensions, such as a shared reality in visible reach of all participants. Hansard, for instance, is, in most cases, considered commensurate with, and as authentic as, the oral parliamentary proceedings of which it is a (sometimes quite heavily post-edited) transcript. Yet transcripts of pub chats normally leave a lot to be desired. They will almost always contain bits and pieces we cannot, with the best of intentions, make sense of.

The problem with the primordial speech situation is that it is impossible in principle to separate what is said from the setting in which it takes place, and one cannot distinguish the linguistic from the non-linguistic symbolic interaction that takes place in it. Not even the most detailed annotation of these non-linguistic factors can replace the immediacy of being part of the situation itself.

Authorship, intentionality and mental states: can the quest for meaning dispense with the investigation of the solitary mind?

In this book, I have presented my ideas on meaning, discourse and society. Meaning, I have said, is to be found only in the discourse. If it is also in people's heads, we would not have access to it there. Our quest for meaning would not be helped by an attempt to construe a monadic mind endowed with a mechanism for processing mental states. My contention is two-fold: first, there is no such object as the ‘mind’ whose workings we might observe directly. If there are mental representations of what is said, we do not have direct access to them. We have to rely on what people tell us about them. What we then get, are people's contributions to a discourse, thus part of the discourse, and not the mental representations themselves. Second, as long as mental representations are confined to the mind and not expressed in any kind of behaviour, including symbolic behaviour, they are meaningless. What someone feels inside but studiously refrains from expressing in any form cannot have an effect on society. It is irrelevant. This leads us, I believe, to the unavoidable conclusion that whatever is said about a person's intentions cannot be based on knowledge of that person's mental states. We have no way of knowing what it is that made a person express herself in a certain way.

Hermeneutics is the art of interpreting texts. Its name is derived from the god Hermes. In Cratylus, Socrates describes the connection between Hermes and interpretation:

Truth is not an issue closely associated with Hermes' character. He is more concerned with the meaning attached to a message. A text, a text segment, a phrase or a simple lexical item, means. When we ask what it means, we expect to be given a paraphrase of the text, an interpretation of it. If I ask ten people, I will probably be told ten different paraphrases. If I want to know what a Chinese sentence means, I have to ask for a translation. Ten different translators will give me ten different translations. Translations are in this sense like interpretations. There will never be the one and only, the perfect translation. Translations and interpretations have to be negotiated, and it does not matter if a consensus is reached or not. There is no mental mechanism that generates the one and only translation in a computational process with a predefined outcome. Translations and interpretations are the contingent results of collaborative efforts of discourse communities, an English Literature class or a community of bilingual speakers.

In the past, many linguists had such a respect for meaning that they were careful to avoid the issue wherever possible. Traditionally, language study has had a strong focus on grammar. Grammar is a land of apparent law and order, in which every part ultimately finds its pigeonhole, if one sorts the elements for long enough. Words and their meanings, however, behave in a disorderly fashion. Words are ambiguous and fuzzy, as any glance at a dictionary entry will confirm. Most words, particularly the more frequent ones, come with more than one ‘sense’, and there is little agreement between dictionaries as to how many senses a given word has, or how these senses are distinguished. This may be one reason why many linguists in the twentieth century had so little patience with them. Mental concepts, on the other hand, were believed to be failsafe in this respect. Each concept was thought to represent one ‘sense’, clearly defined and unambiguously related to other concepts (such as hypernym–hyponym, part–whole, perhaps even synonym–antonym). To many linguists it therefore seemed prudent to leave the words of our natural languages to their poor cousins, the lexicographers. But this has not prevented the linguists from criticising the lexicographers for the inconsistencies that abound in even the best dictionaries, whenever the makers of our dictionaries try to make sense of their words.

For corpus linguistics, a fairly recent paradigm in language studies that has evolved over the last forty years, this picture is no longer true.

Cognitive linguistics, as I see it, has failed to come up with a convincing theory about the mind being the seat of meaning. Similarly, the philosophy of mind has been unable to present us with a model of the mind free of internal contradictions. This leaves us puzzled. There are four options concerning the seat of meaning that have been explored, to a greater or lesser extent, namely:

1. a) the individual intentional mind, the mind that understands meaning;

2. b) the individual computational mind/brain, i.e. the mind enclosed in the hardware environment of the brain, carrying out programs for processing language;

3. c) the brain where language becomes reality;

4. d) the discourse as the collective mind.

In this last chapter of this part of the book, the part devoted to the cognitive conception of the mind as the seat of meaning, I want to summarise the two core stances, as I see them, namely the one of the intentional mind and the one of the computational mind. I will then explore a more recent stance, focusing on the brain as an object of science rather than on the mind as an object of speculation. Finally, I will introduce my own stance, that of the discourse as the collective mind of a discourse community, the stance to which the second part of this book will be devoted.

It is the primordial speech situation which we have to investigate if we want to find out what distinguishes spoken from written language. For me, the typical primordial speech situation is an informal gathering in which participants act, each participant contributing their individual intentions to an emergent collective interaction. This interaction is, to a greater or lesser extent, symbolic, in the sense that it includes verbal communication concerning the behaviour of participants, communication which negotiates, explains and reflects what otherwise would be just behaviour. Primordial speech situations take place in settings shared by participants and encompass the objects which make up this setting. They let their participants share a reality available to all of them.

It does not matter so much how ‘real’ this reality is in a more philosophical sense. Certainly this ‘shared reality’ is already constructed and endorsed through endless negotiations that have taken place in an endless row of past speech situations. In times immemorial, there may have occurred a situation in which the participants found it fit to ‘carve out’ of the stuff that constructs the ‘reality’ an assemblage they agreed on calling a chair. In subsequent situations, they used this label chair for similar assemblages serving the same function. In a current situation the question would hardly arise whether some concrete object could be called a chair; but if it does, for instance with an ambiguous post-modern piece of furniture, negotiations will be collaboratively conducted leading to some degree of agreement among participants as to whether the object should be given that name.

In 1975, Jerry Fodor, a linguist/philosopher close to Noam Chomsky, published his highly influential book The Language of Thought. Here we find the ancient and medieval idea of a lingua mentis in a new wrapping, incidentally without any reference to earlier sources. Indeed it seems almost to have been a complete reinvention. In this book, Fodor pursues the idea that even very young children, before they acquire the natural language spoken in their environment, already possess a language, namely this language of thought, now sometimes also called mentalese. There must be a language of thought, he argues, because ‘you cannot learn a language whose terms express semantic properties not expressed by the terms of some language you are already able to use’ (Fodor 1975: 61). As this is true and accepted for learning a second language, it must also hold for the first (external) language. People are born with an innate language, a mentalese which is universal, i.e. the same for everyone regardless of their ethnic origin. When we speak, we actually formulate an utterance in the language of thought which we subsequently translate into the language we have acquired, in order to communicate: ‘English has no semantics. Learning English isn't learning a theory about what its sentences mean. It's learning to associate its sentences with the corresponding thoughts’ (Fodor 1998: 9, Fodor's emphasis). for Fodor, natural language words are secondary, and mental concepts are primary.

Language as an essential human feature

Society presupposes people interacting with each other, and it presupposes symbolic content. For what turns behaviour into interaction is that a meaning is assigned to it. A congregation of people on the town square is more than the accumulation of each participant's meaningless behaviour; it can be interpreted as a political demonstration, a religious ritual, a celebration, a congestion of shoppers, or the beginning of world revolution. What it means has to be negotiated by the people involved in the interaction. It is not the sociologist or the anthropologist who has the last word. This is what sets a society apart from a pack of dogs or a colony of ants. Their behaviour becomes an interaction only by the grace of the observer. Unlike dogs and ants, people can talk back to their observers. When linguists want to find out what a verbal utterance or any other interaction means, they have to ask the people. That meaning is constructed by the people, and not by those who observe them, is something linguists, sociologists and anthropologists tend to forget quite easily.

Verbal communication is a prerequisite of society. That does not mean we cannot survive in a social situation without speaking the other people's language. An anthropologist has good chances of surviving within a monolingual tribe somewhere in an uncharted valley of Papua New Guinea. Gesturing will go a long way.

Truth and meaning

It is my contention that discourse analysts can easily do without the discourse-external reality. The external reality and the reality constructed in the discourse are only related to each other indirectly, through primordial speech situations, largely outside of our investigative reach. It is true that if we read the sentence ‘There are many apples on the tree’, we can never be sure this sentence refers to a shared reality in which there were actually ‘real’ apples hanging on a ‘real’ tree. But to me it seems more important that the discourse tells us everything people have said about apples being on trees. Our ‘shared reality’ is not the reality out there. What we see there is not just stuff or matter; it is, to a large extent, an assembly of conceptualisations of concrete and abstract objects, properties, states, processes and actions that owe their existence to foregoing negotiations forming the residue of our memories. Without people discussing them, there would be neither apples nor pears. It is this realisation that makes me so suspicious of what is commonly called truth. If there is no link between the non-symbolic reality outside of the discourse, and the symbolic content of the discourse, how could truth be an issue? What we are concerned with is not whether Julianne's apple was truly delicious, but what it means if she calls it delicious. For me, the choice between truth and meaning is easy.